pher. But I was curious about the show
and arranged to visit the head of the
temple, a man named Wu Zhiyou. Wu
looked less like a theologian than like an
actor who'd play the kindly father in a
Chinese soap opera: in his mid-fifties,
he had a large, handsome face, a perfect
pair of dimples in his cheeks, and a res-
onant voice that sounded somehow fa-
miliar. Before being posted to run the
temple, he had spent most of his career
in the research office of the city's Propa-
ganda Department, and he had a mind
for marketing. Of the performance, he
said, "This show has attracted people
from all levels of society---Chinese and
foreigners, men and women, well edu-
cated and less educated, experts and or-
dinary people."
I asked if he was involved in the pro-
duction. "I'm the chief designer!" he
said, eyes shining. "I oversaw every de-
tail. Even the narrator's voice is mine."
The show had been conceived under
demanding circumstances. Wu had
been given only a month's notice before
the birthday celebration. He hired a
composer, recruited dancers from a local
art school, and selected lines from the
classics that could lend the performance
a narrative shape. "You need ups and
downs and a climax, just like a movie or
a play," he said. "If it's too bland, it will
never work."
Wu had succeeded in making the
Confucius Temple into his own com-
munity theatre, and he was savoring his
role. "In junior middle school, I was al-
ways the student leader of the propa-
ganda section of the student council," he
said. "I love reading aloud, and music
and art." In his spare time, he still did
cross-talk comedy routines, the Chinese
version of standup. He had plans for the
temple's future. "We're building a new
set that will have ceramic statues of the
seventy-two disciples. And we need
more lighting. Then, maybe, I can say it
is complete."
Wu checked his watch. He wanted
me to catch the three-o'clock show. He
gave me a book on the history of the
temple and said, "After you read this
book, your questions will no longer be
questions."
The stage, in front of a pavilion on
the north side of the compound, had
been fitted with lights. The cast con-
sisted of sixteen young men and women
in scholars' robes; each song-and-dance
routine was named for a line from the
classics---the Analects, the Book of
Songs, the Book of Rites, and others---
and had an upbeat interpretation: "Hap-
piness" was based on the line "Good
fortune lies within bad; bad fortune lies
within good." (The stage version omit-
ted the ominous second clause.) The
finale, "Harmony," linked Confucius
and the Communist Party. A pamphlet
explained that it conveyed the "harmo-
nious ideology and harmonious society
of the ancient people, which will have a
positive influence on the construction of
modern harmonious society."
I read the book that Wu gave me, and
the depth of detail about ancient
events was impressive: it recorded who
planted which trees on the temple
grounds seven hundred years ago. But it
was conspicuously silent on other mat-
ters, including the years between 1905
and 1981. In the official history of the
Confucius Temple, most of the twenti-
eth century was blank.
During my time in China, I had
learned to expect that renderings of his-
tory came with holes, like the dropouts
in an audio recording when the music
goes silent and resumes as if nothing
had happened. Some of those edits were
ordained from above: for years the peo-
ple were barred from discussing the
crackdown at Tiananmen Square or
the famine of the Great Leap Forward,
which took between thirty million and
forty-five million lives, because the
Party had never repudiated or accepted
responsibility for those events. Ordinary
Chinese had few choices: some accepted
the forgetting, because they were poor
and determined to get on with their
lives; some raged against it, but lacked
the political means to resist.
There were other books about the
Confucius Temple, and these filled in
the blanks---especially about the night
of August 23, 1966, during the opening
weeks of the Cultural Revolution. The
order to "Smash the Four Olds" had de-
volved into a chaotic assault on author-
ity of all kinds. That afternoon, a group
of Red Guards summoned one of Chi-
na's most famous writers, Lao She, to
the temple's front gate.
Lao She was sixty-seven and one of
China's best hopes for the Nobel Prize
in Literature. He had grown up not far
from the temple, in poverty, the son of
an imperial guard who died in battle
against foreign armies. In 1924, he went
to London and stayed for five years,
"Usually I'd be nervous, but the rest of his apartment is so nice."